Lottery tickets are sold at many types of retail establishments including, stores, such as grocery stores, general merchandise stores, and the like. These games are typically online terminal based games wherein players purchase a lottery ticket with either their selection of objects or characters from a defined set (i.e., numbers from a set of number ranging from 1 to 99), or a set of such objects or characters are randomly generated for the player. The lottery gaming authority conducts a subsequent drawing from the set of characters or objects, and players win based on the number or combination of matches in their selection with the draw set. Examples of such games include “Pick-3”, “Pick-4”, “Lotto”, “Powerball”, and so forth. These games are well known to those skilled in the art.
Instant scratch-off lottery tickets are also quite popular and are offered at a wide variety of retail establishments. These tickets generally relate to a game theme, such as bingo or poker, and the player determines if the ticket is a winner by removing an opaque scratch-off material from the play area to reveal certain game variables.
It is generally recognized in the industry that new and different games are essential to sustaining the public's interest and participation in lottery games. Game themes tend to grow stale over time, and must be replaced with newer, more exciting games. With the above-described types of games, this burden falls solely on the gaming authority. New game themes, rules, payouts, etc. are strictly a function of the games supplied by the lottery authority to the retail establishments. Player participation and interest is dictated solely by the boundaries of the game supplied to the retail establishment, with the retail establishments often acting as little more than vendors of the lottery tickets. If the game has no appeal to the player, there is little that can be done at the retail establishment to generate more interest in the game. Also, as more and more establishments offer lottery games, the marketing value of the games for such establishments diminishes.
The lottery games offered at retail establishments also have the disadvantage that the establishment typically has one or more check-out points, commonly referred to as check-out lanes, with each check-out lane equipped with a point-of-sale (POS) terminal. In contrast, lottery tickets are typically sold at a separate lottery point-of-sale terminal or terminals within the same retail establishment. This system generally requires additional personnel to staff the lottery POS terminal, or requires the store clerk to divide their time and responsibility between the lottery POS terminal and the store POS terminal. For larger stores having many POS terminals, customers wishing to also purchase lottery tickets may be faced with a bottleneck situation when there are significantly fewer lottery POS terminals.
The present invention is useful in that it provides a method and system for conducting a lottery game at retail establishments that is a function of events that transpire at the retail establishment, with each play of the game being different based on the player's interaction with the retail establishment prior to the game. The games may be played directly at the establishment POS terminals.